Strategic Plan
Empower the UIC community to discover, use and create knowledge.
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Mission
Empower the UIC community to discover, use and create knowledge.
Vision
A world of equal access to information and resources where everyone is inspired to achieve their goals.
Values
The UIC Library is its people—the faculty, staff, and students who create, preserve, and provide access to knowledge and share expertise to foster user success. The deeply held values of these individuals create the energy that drives the excellence of our organization.
- User-centeredness
We are committed to helping others. We seek to understand our diverse users’ needs through conversation and data gathering, aligning our resources and services accordingly. - Inclusiveness
We are committed to creating a welcoming environment for all staff and users in which diverse identities, backgrounds, and experiences are respected and diverse skills are nurtured and developed. We are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty and staff through active recruitment and thoughtful mentoring. We are committed to collecting and preserving resources that tell the stories of the diverse communities that make up Chicago and ensuring that all of our resources are accessible and easy to use. - Equity and Social Justice
We are committed to ensuring equal access to information through active support of open scholarship, inclusive collecting of resources and accessible resources and systems. - Creativity
We are committed to creative problem-solving as we explore improved practices in information and service delivery, having fun along the way and embracing failure as a part of the process. - Collaboration
We are committed to working with each other, campus, community and other partners, understanding that good relationships create better ideas and stronger outcomes. - Communication
We are committed to listening actively and sharing information with each other and the UIC community as openly as possible. - Force for Good
We are committed to creating a positive impact on our communities and our colleagues. - Privacy and Intellectual Freedom
We are committed to the privacy of our users and to the freedom of expression as manifested in respectful discourse. - Professional Commitment
We are committed to research and service that advances knowledge and practice in our campus libraries and our fields. - Personal Responsibility
We are committed to treating each other and our users with kindness, compassion and encouragement. We are committed to approaching our work with integrity, joy, gratitude and optimism. We are committed to producing quality work that is accurate, consistent, reliable and efficient. We are committed to taking advantage of opportunities to grow professionally and personally. - Information Literacy
We are committed to helping our community learn how to critically evaluate information for authenticity, validity, and reliability in order to combat misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, and fake news. We support scientific integrity and science-based policy.
Goals
Goal 1: Access
Build seamless, comprehensive and consistent access to global collections, instruction and services whether digital or physical.
- Integrate our electronic resources, physical spaces and services so that users are aware of the breadth and depth of information available to them.
- Implement a preservation and access repository to provide access to approximately 40 TB of unique born-digital and digitized materials.
- Improve communication about what resources and materials are available to faculty and students.
Goal 2: Include
Create and sustain an inclusive culture and a welcoming environment for all.
- Continue to develop and build awareness of collections that represent diverse perspectives and engage students.
- Demonstrate cultural competence in all aspects of Library services, policies, facilities and programming.
- Recruit and retain a diverse faculty and staff.
- Implement programs that support diversifying the profession of librarianship.
- Re-envision the role of the Library Diversity Committee to provide leadership and guidance in helping the Library achieve its overall goals of creating and sustaining an inclusive culture.
Goal 3: Integrate
Expand integration of the Library into UIC faculty and students’ research life cycles.
- Build the capacity to support digital scholarship.
- Lead efforts to incentivize the creation and adoption of open educational resources (OER).
- Lead efforts to develop impact reports on university research outputs, including the faculty profile tool.
- Continue to build rich collections that record the diverse history of Chicago and the university and increase researchers’ access to Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).